Disabling labour: race, disability and Indian indentured labour on Fijian sugar plantations, 1879–1920

ABSTRACT

The establishment in the1830s of the Indian indentured labour system as a cheap labour source for British sugar plantations provoked criticism from parliamentarians, missionaries and labour advocates who considered indenture the reintroduction of slavery by another name. Like slavery, the indenture system bonded into labour non-white, poor and unfree workers, already subordinated within the British empire. Like slavery, the Indian indentured labour system was structurally disabling. The development of colonial racial typologies of the ideal labourer embedded race into notions of the able bodied worker. While being of a preferred racial type was a condition of fitness to work it also exposed labourers to the disabling circumstances of being unfree labour on sugar plantations. Indenture practised in Fiji from 1879 to 1917 reflects the disabling effects of racial and economic subordination even in the late indenture period when labour conditions had improved. The development of systematic government measures to select workers as fit for the regulation of plantation labour and the disabling impacts of injury, illness, sexual and mental trauma experienced on the plantation, qualify the notion that modern western ideas of disability emerge primarily from urban industrializing environments.

KEYWORDS:

• Disability
• Indian indenture
• slavery
• labour
• Fiji

Article

In 1910 John Wear Burton, a Methodist missionary to the Indians in Fiji, described the difference between the life of an indentured labourer there and ‘absolute slavery’ as ‘merely in the name and term of years’. Burton suggested that as a slave the Indian labourer in Fiji would have been better fed and housed than under the indenture system. He reported that:

The coolies themselves, for the most part, frankly call it narak (hell)! Not only are the wages low, the food scant, but it is an entirely different life from that to which they have been accustomed, and they chafe, especially at first, at the bondage.¹

Fiji became a British crown colony on 10 October 1874 and, from 1879, Indian indentured labourers known as girmityas from the term girmit (agreement) were introduced into the colony to work on sugar plantations largely owned by the Australian Colonial Sugar Refining Company (CSR).² CSR profits were substantially repatriated to Australia and New Zealand and the company was structured to maximize profit and to pay as low a price as possible for sugar cane and consequently as little as possible for the labour which produced it.³ Fiji was the last British colony to import Indian plantation labour under the colonial system of indenture introduced into the Caribbean in the 1830s. Indenture was argued for by planters and British parliamentarians as being a ‘free’ form of labour essential to maintain the colonial sugar industry denuded of labour by the abolition of slavery.⁴ Almost as soon as it was introduced, opponents argued that indenture was a new form of slavery.⁵ Protests from India and multiple government enquiries into the exploitation and abuse of indentured labourers led to the abolition of the system in 1917.⁶ Local voices for the abolition of indenture in the Pacific included Burton and H.E. Holland, a Labour Party Member of Parliament in New Zealand. Holland argued from a position of Christian and worker advocacy against planters’ requirements for 'cheap coloured labour on the plantations’.⁷

This article draws on recent historiography of slavery and disability to argue that the Indian indentured labour system, like the trans-Atlantic slavery it partly replaced, was structurally disabling. Race and class were fundamental to the vulnerability of individuals and communities to integration into unfree labour systems and the risk of physical and psychological impairment they posed.⁸ Once working on the plantation, being non-white and poor reinforced the disabling structures of indenture as a colonial labour system with the low class status of the labourers compounded by the colour prejudices of British colonial and settler societies.⁹ Australia and New Zealand both had ‘white’ immigration policies in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries which reinforced colonial ideas of non-white people as fundamentally of less value, increasing their vulnerability to exploitation.¹⁰ While the workers considered fit to provide the new Australian working class were white, male, physically strong and free,¹¹ those who provided labour on Australian and Fijian offshore plantations were preferably male, non-white and unfree. The ‘fitness’ of the Indian labourer to do plantation work was grounded in imperially endorsed racial theories of climatic compatibility and colonial office discourses of the fitness of Indian labourers, particularly those characterized as ‘hill coolies’, to do manual work in tropical climates.¹² The fitness of non-white races to labour was also framed in economic terms. In the indenture system, Indians were deemed more fit to work and of greater economic value to plantation owners because their labour could be procured more cheaply than a white labourer’s. In 1912, when pressure was increasing to end the indenture system, and the labour movement in Australia was pressing for better pay for white labourers,¹³ Mr Powell, President of the Planters’ Association in Fiji objected that

it would be utterly impossible for Fiji to compete with the islands of other countries if she were compelled to pay white labourers 8s a day, even if they were available, as against the 1s a day paid for black labour in those other places.¹⁴

While race was essential to the selection of particular groups as able bodied and fit for plantation work, the indenture system also developed medically framed structures to exclude any person deemed physically or mentally unfit. At recruitment centres in India and on disembarking in Fiji and other colonies, Indians were examined and included or excluded from indenture on the basis of their physical and mental fitness for planation labour. In the colonial indenture system, being non-white played a constitutive role in subjecting Indian indentured labourers to scrutiny as able bodied and fit for work; it also made them liable to being identified as unfit to work and of no economic value. Once selected as able bodied, the subordinate status of Indian unfree indentured labourers on European owned plantations reinforced colonial racial hierarchies which constructed the white colonizer as normal and able and the colonized as ‘other’ and subordinate.¹⁵ The institutionalized inspection, measurement, selection and recording of types of people fit to work on plantations embedded racialized, ethnic and gendered notions of the able body into colonial labour and migration systems.¹⁶ Colonial and imperial management of indentured labour migration entrenched a racially indexed concept of the able bodied labourer as physically strong, colonized, ‘cheap coloured’ and unfree. Medicalized surveillance and record keeping, discussed below, further refined the concept of the able bodied labourer excluding from the racialized categories those who were considered too infirm for plantation work.

Disability historians have argued that aspects of the modern western concept of the disabled body were configured in the factories of industrializing Britain on the basis of the fitness of the white labouring poor to submit to factory regulation.¹⁷ Not only were indentured systems grounded in disabling colonial notions of racial hierarchy¹⁸ but they were part of the industrializing capitalism identified by many historians as foundational to modern constructions of disability.¹⁹ The expansion of plantation economies provided raw materials directly linked to the growth in European industrial capitalism and drove demand for ‘enslaved and coerced labour workforces’.²⁰ Plantations used intensive levels of agricultural activity with field workers doing the jobs of planting, weeding, hoeing, harvesting and carting a variety of raw materials in work systems as regimented, regulated and time dependent as urban factories in England or indeed the coal mines that provided their source of fuel.²¹ Plantations typically also included machinery and apparatus which became more modern as industrialization progressed. Threshing machines, cane crushing machines, railways for transport all became part of the plantation agricultural and industrial set up and created opportunities for devastating injuries. Indian labourers in the tea plantations of Assam in India and those working in offshore sugar colonies like Fiji were subject to a similar shift from agricultural to industrialized forms of regulated task allocation and time keeping. Factory and field were connected in ways that maximized productivity and provided new contexts for defining the fitness of body and mind.²² Nearly a century of systematic colonial construction of non-white people as racially and physically fit to work on plantations racialized and ‘orientalized’ ideas of the able and disabled body within unfree systems of labour and contributed to western ideas of the relationship between disability and capacity to work.²³

The first section of this article focuses on the way that race and the development of typologies of the ideal labourer complicated ideas of being able bodied during the period of British regulated Indian indenture. While being non-white was a condition of fitness to work on colonial plantations it also introduced labourers to the disabling circumstances of being unfree labourers. Secondly, drawing on the experience of indenture in late nineteenth and early twentieth century Fiji, the article considers the way that indenture disabled those who worked within the system. The article argues that the racial and economic subordination built into indenture made it structurally disabling even in the late indenture period when labour conditions had improved. Those selected as able bodied for plantation work were exposed to disabling physical and mental damage within the plantation labour systems. The indentured labour system was a global regimen that defined particular groups and physical attributes as both able bodied and subordinate in colonial racial hierarchies of labour.

Disabilities of race and unfree labour

In slavery and indenture plantation systems the human body was identified as fit and able primarily on the basis of capacity to perform arduous manual work. However, selection as able bodied within these unfree labour systems was in the first instance based on identification of specific racial groups as being suited to labour. As Stefanie Kennedy and Melanie J Newton argue for African slavery in the British colonial possessions, this article argues that race plays a constitutive role in colonial ideas of the able and disabled indentured body.²⁴ There is a risk that in considering race as an aspect of disability, the distinctiveness of impairment as a disabling condition constructive of particular marginalities is lost. Catherine Kudlick’s brilliant 2003 essay, ‘Disability History: Why we need another “other”’²⁵ however encourages a breadth of engagement and the recognition that descriptions of various impairments are deeply embedded in historical and contemporary cultures, often qualifying and amplifying other marginalities. Colonialism mediated racially indexed notions of fitness and capability within the Indian indentured system. Advocates for Indian indentured labour to replace African slaves argued that white labourers were ill suited to work in the hard and hot conditions of tropical sugar plantations but Indian ‘coolies’ provided suitable plantation workers.²⁶ Qualifying the racial profile of the ideal Indian indentured labourer was the association of fitness for work with low caste status, poverty and social marginalization.²⁷ The Indian indentured labourer was physically strong but was disabled by social and economic weakness in relation to Indian caste society as well as being subordinate to British imperial authority.

Partly through the intervention of John Gladstone, a Liverpool based British merchant and planter, the ‘Hill coolie’ became part of the colonial construction of the able bodied labourer suited to work throughout the British colonies.²⁸ In 1836, seeking workers for his sugar estates on Demerara, Gladstone wrote to Gillanders, Arbuthnot and Co. a Calcutta merchant house with experience in arranging for the export of Indian indentured labour. Gillanders, Arbuthnot and Co. recommended labourers from the ‘Dhangur’ tribe north of Calcutta as suitable on the basis of their racial and physical characteristics. The men were described as ‘all well-limbed and active’ and being ‘docile and easily manageable’.²⁹ Writing to Sir Hobhouse, Gladstone argued that in the absence of slave labour, the British government should instigate a regulated labour system for colonial sugar estates focusing on the ‘Hill Coolie’ as a category of ideal Indian indentured labourer, ‘docile, quiet, orderly, and able-bodied’.³⁰

The tribal groups from the Northeast who largely comprised this model of the ideal labourer were already identified in colonial narratives as an itinerant and mobile work force, subordinated and marginalized as tribal groups outside the caste system. The development of this pool of cheap and mobile labour was substantially the consequence of British introduction of new land tenure systems, that dispossessed and damaged tribal structures, and deliberate military subjection of the hill tribes of the Northeast who had strenuously resisted colonial rule.³¹ Military efforts to pacify the Northeastern Chota Nagpur region, referred to as ‘coolie wars’, forced increasing numbers of tribal men and women onto the plains with only their labour to sell.³² Their marginal and mobile status was considered an asset in the British construction of a new able bodied unfree labour force which provided the backbone of initial recruitment in the indenture system.³³ The Dhangar began appearing in Calcutta from 1820 and by 1837, John Mackay, an indigo planter in Bengal, thought at least 50,000 Dhangar were working in indigo factories there.³⁴ The term ‘Dhangar’ referred to a hired labourer or seasonal farm worker and represented the erasure of multiple histories, cultures, languages and identities.³⁵ The Dhangur, were described as having ‘no local ties, nor any objection to leave their country’.³⁶ Displaced from their hill homes, the Ho, Munda, Oaraon, Bhumij, Kols, Santal and Paharia tribes became integrated into indentured waged labour systems both in India and in the overseas colonies in an effort to survive.³⁷

In the overseas sugar plantations, the hill coolies became the solution to post slavery labour shortages. The Dhangar became the ideal labourer. Not only were they racially subordinate but within the category of Indian, the Dhangar were tribal groups, outside caste, and represented in colonial discourse as prepared to do any work and to survive on any food. To the disability of displacement, loss of culture, language and identity was added the disabling impacts of being considered barely human in needs. Gillanders, Arbuthnot and Co. described Dhangurs as ‘always spoken of as more akin to the monkey than the man’.³⁸ The docile and strong ‘coolie labourer’,³⁹ ‘a fine athletic race of people, who eat fresh meat or any other kind of food without scruple’ and ‘free from the prejudices of the Hindoos and Mahometans’ became desired as labourers from Mauritius to Australia.⁴⁰ In the late 1830s, as indenture became established, at least one third of those who left Calcutta for overseas plantations were tribal people from Chota Nagpur.⁴¹ The massive displacement, loss of community, sickness and death of so many on sea voyages shows that, like slavery, the indenture system was structurally disabling, damaging the social and economic fabric of labourers’ lives. Historical arguments for indenture as an act of agency for the worker⁴² must be qualified by the ignorance among labourers of the distance and circumstance of their indenture. Death rates among ‘hill coolies’ were sometimes as high as 50% during the passage to plantations in Assam or Mauritius on boats with barely room to lie down, little food or medical care.⁴³

By the 1860s writers at The Economist, which had taken a position of opposition to the slave trade, were ‘warm advocates’ for Indian indentured labour on the basis that Indians were able to work hard and were better fitted temperamentally to plantation work than African people.⁴⁴ The specificity of the ‘hill coolie’ as a preferred labour type became diluted however as the demand for labour in Natal, Mauritius and, later, Fiji lead to recruitment for plantations from Punjab, central and south India as well as the preferred regions of Bengal. Recruitment remained highest in regions where famine and scarcity drove up grain prices and there were few alternatives for work.⁴⁵ When labour was scarce however, Brahmins, whose high caste status typically precluded manual labour, Muslims who, together with Punjabis, were characterized as ‘martial races’ in British typologies, and were seen as unsuited to the subordination of indenture, became included in recruitment drives.⁴⁶ In the late indenture period, most of the 24% of labourers recruited to Fiji were from South Indian Tamil districts, Telugu speaking areas of Vizagapatnam and the Malayali-speaking west coast. As labour became more scarce, labourers recruited for Fiji tended to reflect the balance of the local population, including higher castes and diverse religious groups such as Muslims and Sikhs depending on the recruitment area.⁴⁷

Indenture was also a strongly gendered labour system. The Assam Tea Company began commercial tea production in 1840 and recruitment of labour became formalized into indenture systems with tribal recruits, particularly young women, from the regions of Chota Nagpur seen as the preferred type of ‘tea coolie’.⁴⁸ Women were preferred for the handpicking of tea leaves on the plantations in Darjeeling and Assam, but men were preferred for the sugar plantations overseas. Though never fully implemented, reforms of the indenture system increased requirements of female recruits to provide family life on the sugar plantations.⁴⁹ The Emigration Agent for Natal, R W Mitchell, advised his sub agents that ‘you may pass all females of eighteen and over no matter whether Mohamedan or of other than the lowest caste, provided they have reasonably hard hands and are not beggars, devotees, or dancing girls’.⁵⁰ The priority for female recruits was capacity to work, low economic status and also good character. Women who were beggars, dancers and temple women were represented in colonial discourse as prostitutes and of low moral character.⁵¹ The lower proportion of women to men on plantations and the notion of the woman as a sexual risk was an aspect of gendering of indenture that contributed to women's vulnerability to sexual violence on the plantations. Women, not men, were seen as the site of moral virtue and moral risk.

The persistent link between race and unfree labour in the colonial construction of the Indian indenture system resonates with Christina Visperas’ doubt that any person subordinated through slavery can be considered ‘able-bodied’.⁵² Ideas of racial fitness and economic vulnerability formed part of the colonial conceptualization of the able bodied worker and were endorsed by private plantation interests. Holland’s 1920 publication in New Zealand of Indentured Labour: Is it Slavery? and objection to indenture as exploitation of ‘coloured and cheap labour’ highlight the persistent association of slavery and racial subordination with indenture in the colonial south Pacific. Despite the increasing criticism of indenture as a slavery like practice in Fiji, the Colonial Sugar Refining company insisted that the Indian and Fijian colonial governments keep supplying labour characterized as cheap and Indian to its Fijian plantations.⁵³

Fitness to work and disability

Concepts of the fit labourer disseminating through the colonial office and recruitment agencies played a significant role in embedding racial and economic vulnerabilities into ideas of fitness to work. The division of labourers into categories of able and nonable bodied was a structural element in the recruitment of indentured plantation labour.⁵⁴ Industrial paradigms of work as repetitive and physically demanding manual labour translated to the plantation context and the construction of the disabled body as that of a person unfit to perform manual labour.⁵⁵ Potential labourers were screened both before leaving the depot in India and again at their point of immigration before being permitted to join a plantation. The fitness required was of both mind and body with those considered too week or otherwise impaired by mental infirmity and illnesses, such as leprosy, returned to India.⁵⁶ Natal Emigrant Protector, Lieutenant Colonel Banastre Pryce Llyod, had recommended in 1877 a classification of indentured labourers into ‘able bodied’ and ‘non able bodied’ with wages adjusted according to capacity.⁵⁷ The 1883 Indian Ordinance Act clearly stated that ‘permanently disabled’ immigrants may be returned to India.⁵⁸ In the case of indentured migration to Fiji the same principles were maintained under the successive Fiji immigration ordinances and regulations. Under the provisions of Ordinance VI, 1907 medical inspection of immigrants on arrival provided for their return if deemed ‘unfit’ for indenture.⁵⁹ Those with leprosy were isolated in Fiji if they had no means of subsistence in India.⁶⁰ Provision was made for partial capacity to work with ‘Immigrants fit for indenture but unfit to perform a full task’ classified and recorded by the Agent-General on the certificate of indenture as capable of only half or three quarters of the usual task.⁶¹ Burton confirmed the practice for Fiji in 1910, that those people ‘too far below standard’ were rejected and sent back to India.⁶² These practices and the high death rate from accidents may explain the relative paucity of evidence of those working with physical impairments on the Fiji plantations. Sugar cane planting, cultivation and processing involved machinery. Accidents were common and, in most cases, catastrophic and fatal. The distance from hospitals and the quality of surgery and medication available during the indenture period all contributed to loss of life.

In Fiji, accidents occurred particularly among workers at the sugar mills where raw cane was processed. Data assembled by Anthony Cole indicated that the majority of deaths by accident were among male workers, a reflection of the gendered division of labour in the indenture system and sugar industry. From 1879 to 1916, twenty-six men and one woman died from accidents at the mill. Train and tram accidents relating to the movement of cane and labourers accounted for the deaths of fifteen men and two women, and crush accidents killed twelve men and one woman.⁶³ The sugar mill was dangerous and noisy. Injuries to hearing are not recorded but were likely to be significant. Mechanized shredders were used to crush the sugar cane, long networks of conveyor belts carried the cane through each stage of processing, massive rollers crushed juice from the fibre and enormous boilers were used to refine and purify the cane juice. Indentured labourers were largely recruited from rural backgrounds and few were familiar with such machines. Differences in language among workers and overseers, compounded by the noise of the machines, no doubt contributed to accidents in the mill. Another factor was the loose clothing worn by indentured workers which could get caught up in machinery. Annual reports record for example, one ‘man climbing up to oil some machinery … and getting his clothes caught’. The 1906 Annual Report noted ‘an immigrant attending on a “shredder” who when [he] used his hand to try to clear a stuck pulley was drawn into the machine by his shirt and was fatally injured’. Crush injuries also occurred outside the factory. In 1904 an indentured labourer from Madras ‘failed to let go of the log when ordered’ resulting in being fatally crushed. Difficulties experienced by Tamil speaking south Indians coming into the dominantly Hindi speaking Fiji indentured labour context were likely a factor in this and other accidents. Trams used to transport cane and workers via light rail were another significant source of accidents, particularly during the cane crushing season when additional lines were laid into fields and onto less stable areas of land. Catastrophic injury and death occurred to labourers managing the trucks that ran on these lines. In one instance a man was killed while shifting trucks from field to the tramline when one truck left the line and ran over him. Derailment crushed workers riding in open cane trucks to and from the fields and, despite exhortations to provide special transport for indentured workers, little changed and the accidents continued to happen.⁶⁴

In their Report to the Government of India on the ‘Conditions of Indian Immigrants in Four British Colonies and Surinam’, James McNeill and Mr Chimman Lal outlined considerable improvements in conditions in Fiji and the care taken to ensure sufficient provision for the health of labourers sent there.⁶⁵ When they visited Fiji in 1913, there were sixteen thousand Indians working under terms of indenture across over 200 plantation estates.⁶⁶ The McNeill-Lal investigation was ostensibly to enquire into working conditions on plantations in response to increasing pressure from within India to abolish the indenture system.⁶⁷ Interest in the health of the labourer remained however couched in terms of plantation productivity and the ability of the labourer to work to capacity. Fitness to work was a way of conceptualizing the labouring body as of ability and value within the CSR dominated plantation economy of colonial Fiji.⁶⁸ By this stage of indenture, labourers were only allotted to sugar plantations when the Agent-General was satisfied that either a plantation hospital or other hospital facilities were available for the sick.⁶⁹ They observed that in the case of Fiji’s plantations, in general, hospitals were within acceptable distances with the greatest distances between hospitals and estates in the Lau Islands. Despite the situation in Lau, the report notes: ‘From the average earnings of the past years it would seem that this had not in fact interfered with the working efficiency of the labourers employed’. The improvement in accommodation, sanitation and medical care, particularly the work of the Chief Medical Officer and District Medical Staff in Fiji together with the plantation employers and the Inspectors of Immigrants, were noted as producing ‘praiseworthy results which are clearly reflected in the wage-earning capacity of the labourers’.⁷⁰

In Indentured Labour: Is it Slavery? Holland challenged the sanguine image of the Indian indentured task worker prospering under a benignly regulated labour regime presented in the McNeill-Lal Report. Holland recorded Burton’s description of conditions:

Men, women and children work under the task system. It is slavery in everything but name. The hours are from 5.30 in the morning. The average wage is 1/- per day and 5 1/2d for women. Out of this they have to buy their clothing. Rice is 3d a lb so that a woman works half a day for a lb of rice. The only way the coolies can save is by a process of cultured self-starvation. If through weakness they cannot perform the allotted task, wages are correspondingly reduced, so that the average earnings of some men fall as low as 4d a day.⁷¹

As occurred in many plantation contexts, chronic illness remained a source of impairment among indentured labourers on the Fiji plantations. McNeill and Lal reported the most common diseases among indentured populations as ‘dysentery, tuberculosis, dengue fever, febricula, skin diseases and ankylostomiasis’; all were debilitating and often chronic.⁷² Despite their avowed responsibility for the health of their workers, plantations consistently prioritized productivity over the maintenance of the worker as able bodied.⁷³ In Fiji as on other colonial plantations, management of incapacity to work was partly through the plantation hospitals which also treated a small number of Indians whose indenture period had come to an end. However, dysentery and death caused by accidents and violence, including suicide, kept the death rates high.⁷⁴ Within this regime, chronic illness was a source of disability which resulted in less pay. Under the Indian Immigration Ordinance, No 1. of 1891, section 3 the definition of a ‘task’ was based on the ‘task-work that could be performed by an “able-bodied” male adult immigrant in six hours working steadily at such work’, for a woman the expectation was three quarters of the extent of the work. The expectation was the performance of five and a half tasks in a week. The ordinance recognized that not all indentured labourers would be fit to perform a full task. Incapacity was medicalized with a medical officer required to inspect indentured workers and to identify and record those unable to perform a full task as a ‘three-quarter task labourer, or as a half-task labourer’.⁷⁵ Those on reduced tasks were paid proportionate wages.⁷⁶ In 1912 McNeill and Lal found that one in 12 labourers imported were allotted limited tasks.⁷⁷

The structural institutional violence and embedded inequalities of power which Kudlick identifies as foundational to the experience of disability can be found throughout the indenture system. Indian labourers who left the plantation before their term of indenture was complete could be arrested by their employer without a warrant.⁷⁸ To the punishment of hunger and poverty for incapacity to work was added corporal and legal punishment. Burton commented on the ‘difficulty in keeping the coolies up to their work’ on some plantations but notes that ‘it is only in aggravated cases that the overseer takes the extreme step of bringing the indentured man or woman before the court, for it means loss of time both to employer and employed’. Even so, in 1907 of 11,689 adults 1,461 were proceeded against ‘for breaches of the labour laws’. Scarce attention was made to the distinction between refusal to work and incapacity to work in terms of the resulting punishment: Burton noted that: ‘They either refused or were unable to complete the tasks given them, and consequently were fined or imprisoned according to their choice’.⁷⁹ For women, particularly with children, fines or reduction in wages for absence because of illness was particularly harsh, given that they were already paid significantly less for their work than Indian men.⁸⁰

Disabilities of violence

In Missionary Discourses of Difference, Esme Cleall emphasizes the relationship between colonialism and the violence of subordination experienced by those colonized and the way that experiencing violence not only damages the body but the mind.⁸¹ The reduction in ‘harshness or violence towards labourers’ commended in McNeill and Lal’s report indicated that such practices still occurred.⁸² In an effort to control the ‘brutal’ behaviour of overseers, legislation passed in 1907 stipulated fines, dismissal or imprisonment for ‘an employer or person having control over indentured immigrants who shall assault, beat, or ill use such an immigrant’.⁸³ The weak application of even these measures resulted in wounding and murder of overseers by labourers who saw little other means of obtaining redress.⁸⁴ Sub-Agent of Immigration, John Forster noted in 1900 that: ‘There have been too many cases where the complainants have the evidence of violence on their bodies and yet could not prosecute successfully’.⁸⁵ As W.A. Farquhar, the CSR’ s ‘roving inspector’ commented after labour difficulties in 1908, ‘the trouble with the coolies was mainly due to us squeezing the last dop out of them’.⁸⁶ Holland argued passionately that indentured labourers in Fiji were treated as slaves, citing Burton’s reporting of violence against workers by overseers on Fiji plantations.⁸⁷ Burton writing in 1910 was not opposed to employment of Indian workers in Fiji but saw the indenture system as like slavery, essentially ‘dehumanizing and degrading’ allowing opportunity for a man ‘coarse, sensual, brutal’ to ‘wreck his revenge or gratify his baser passions without great fear of discovery’.⁸⁸

Women were particularly vulnerable to violence on the plantation, their low status making legal redress almost impossible. Burton gave an example of an overseer who because one of the women working in the fields, Motilal, refused his advances ‘struck her over her head with his whip; and in his anger ripped off her clothes and left her standing almost naked, with the other women laughing at her’. Her husband Jagnandan Singh rejected any hope of gaining a conviction in court saying that the overseer would pay witnesses to deny the charge.⁸⁹ The disability of race and colonial subordination was deeply embedded in the disabling treatment of women on the plantations. As Burton noted: ‘Some Englishmen seem to imagine that because a woman is brown she has therefore, no rights of person’.⁹⁰ Women were doubly subordinate on plantations, single women being placed under the authority of an Indian man as well as that of the European planter. Din Muhammad, who was sardar (head man) on a plantation, was beaten by the overseer ‘so savagely that he had to be sent to the hospital’ after resisting his ‘improper proposals’ towards the women in his care. Din Muhammad was jailed for resisting the overseer’s imposition on the plantation women and only gained redress when the ‘coolie inspector’ investigated further. Cases of conviction against overseers were rarely brought or successful without outside government interference.⁹¹

Violence between Indian workers was also widely reported by both planters and critics of indenture as a systemic part of plantation culture. While Indian labourers were preferred by planters as docile and able bodied, they were also represented in some planter’s accounts as irrationally violent.⁹² Women endured disproportionate disabilities of physical and mental impairment consequent on violence including sexual assault. During the period of Fiji indenture, women were the victims of extreme violence including murder, attempted murder, manslaughter and grievous wounding. Rape, ‘carnal knowledge of a girl under 13’ and other forms of sexual assault were linked by colonial officials to the relative paucity of women on the plantations despite increasing the ratio in the 1870s to forty women to every 100 men.⁹³ Colonial reports of sexual jealousy among men and promiscuity among women contributed another dimension to the racial othering of Indian indentured labourers; the disability of race and subordination complicated by a further moral disabling.⁹⁴ In addition to experiencing sexual assault, for Indian women a further psychological and cultural violence was inflicted through their stigmatization by both European and Indian men as responsible for murder, prostitution, infant mortality and male suicide on the plantation.⁹⁵

Sent from India by M. K. Gandhi to enquire into indenture abuses, Anglican missionary, C. F. Andrews visited Fiji in 1915. His final report written with W.W. Pearson used first-hand accounts of the recruitment and selection of labourers in India and their experience of indenture in Fiji to argue against the system.⁹⁶ In his 1915 speech to the Planters’ Associate Executive in Fiji, C.F. Andrews argued that despite McNeill and Lal’s report of the prosperity experienced by Indians in Fiji, the Fijian data in the report on the rate of suicide and attempted suicide among indentured Indians was the highest of any of the plantation economies and higher than in India. Worse, from Andrew’s perspective, was the report of sexual immorality and assault on women. Andrews condemned McNeill’s report asserting that: ‘The good things that he said about Fiji weighed as nothing compared with those moral evils’.⁹⁷ The defence of Indian women’s virtue woman’s became an anti-indenture rallying cry in India where ‘Kunti’s cry’ came to represent all women violated in the British plantation system.⁹⁸ Evidence from Fiji of the vulnerability of the Indian labourer to moral as well as physical impairment was instrumental to the end of indenture recruitment in 1917.⁹⁹

Conclusion

In the Indian indenture system, race, qualified by class and caste, functioned as a disabling condition, creating vulnerability to servitude while also contributing to the construction of human value as linked to capacity to work. The linkage of race to plantation labour qualifies modern constructions of disability as founded in industrialization. Plantation economies provided a context for colonial construction of typologies of the disabled and fit labourer mediated by race, community, caste and class hierarchies. As Kennedy and Newton, drawing on Erevelles, note: ‘Disability is not a “condition of being but of becoming”’.¹⁰⁰ British parliamentary opposition to the introduction of indentured labour hinged in part on its similarity to slave systems and the concern that indentured labour was a way of ‘becoming’ which would transform workers back into slaves. Underpinning this article are points of similarity between disabling characteristics of indentured plantation labour and those of plantation slavery. In both instances the racial premise of fitness for work racializes labour based ideas of the able body. As with trans-Atlantic slavery, those selected for integration into plantation economies on the basis of their racial and physical fitness were also subject to the disabling circumstances of the plantation. Disability was an everyday aspect of life on Fijian sugar plantations. Those weakened by injury or illness were placed on reduced wages, limiting access to food and increasing the risk of punishment. Violence, sexual predation and dangerous working conditions caused physical and mental injuries which were often fatal. Women were doubly disabled by their lower earning capacity and moral stigmatization.¹⁰¹ Selection of able bodied workers and their integration into indentured labour systems embedded racial, medical and gendered concepts of the ideal worker into colonial ideas of fitness to work. Perversely, indentured labourers were fundamentally disabled by the same system that chose them as able bodied and fit to work.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by India New Zealand Education Council (INZEC) and by the Marsden Fund Council from Government funding, managed by Royal Society Te Apārangi, New Zealand.

Notes on contributors

Jane Buckingham

Jane Buckingham is a historian of India and the Pacific with a particular interest in histories of disability, health and labour migration.

Notes

1 John Wear Burton, The Fiji of Today, London: C. H. Kelly, 1910, p 271.

2 Bruce Knapman, ‘Capitalism's Economic Impact in Colonial Fiji, 1874–1939: Development or Underdevelopment?’, The Journal of Pacific History, 20(2), 1985, pp 66–83, p 70; For key histories of Indian indentured labour in Fiji see Kenneth L Gillion, Fiji's Indian Migrants: A History to the End of Indenture in 1920, Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1962; Brij V. Lal, Chalo Jahaji: On a Journey through Indenture in Fiji, Canberra: Australian National University Press, 2012.

3 Michael Moynagh, Brown or White? A History of the Fiji Sugar Industry, 1873–1973, Australian National University Pacific Research Monograph No. 5, Canberra, 1981, pp 4, 8–9.

4 Jonathan Connolly, ‘Indentured Labour Migration and the Meaning of Emancipation: Free Trade, Race, and Labour in British Public Debate, 1838–1860’, Past and Present, 238(1), 2018, pp 85–119.

5 Madhavi Kale, Fragments of Empire: Capital, Slavery, and Indian Indentured labour in the British Caribbean, Pennsylvania: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1998, pp 7–10.

6 Among others: Geoghegan’s Report on Coolie Emigration from India, British Parliamentary Papers 1874, XLVII; Report of the Royal Commissioners Appointed to Enquire into the Treatment of Immigrants in Mauritius, British Parliamentary Papers, 1875, XXXIV.

7 H E Holland, Indentured Labour – is it Slavery, Greymouth, 1920; Debate on Treaties of Peace Amendment Bill, New Zealand Parliamentary Debates, 1920, Vol. 187, p 1220.

8 Suman Seth, Difference and Disease: Medicine, Race, and the Eighteenth-Century British Empire, New York: Cambridge University Press, 2018, pp 248–250, 267–268 on arguments for suitability of ‘black’ Africans as slave labour on plantations.

9 P S O'Connor, ‘Keeping New Zealand White, 1908-1920’, New Zealand Journal of History, 2(1), 1968, pp 41–65, pp 46–48; Jacqueline Leckie, Invisible: New Zealand’s History of Excluding Kiwi-Indians, Auckland: Massey University Press, 2021, pp 31–32.

10 O'Connor, ‘Keeping New Zealand White’, pp 41, 44-49; Margaret Allen, ‘Shadow Letters and the “Karnana” Letter: Indians Negotiate the White Australia Policy, 1901–21’, Life Writing, 8(2), 2011, pp 187–202; David C Atkinson, ‘The White Australia Policy, the British Empire, and the World’, Britain and the World, 8(2), 2015, pp 204-224, pp 210–211.

11 Esme Cleall, Colonising Disability: Impairment and Otherness Across Britain and its Empire, c. 1800-1914, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022, pp 187–188, 194-5; Julia Martínez, ‘Questioning “White Australia”: Unionism and “Coloured” Labour, 1911-37’, Labour History, 76 (May), 1999, pp 1–19.

12 Janet Doust, ‘Setting Up Boundaries in Colonial Eastern Australia Race and Empire’, Australian Historical Studies 35(123), 2004, pp 152-166, pp 153–5; Andrea Major, ‘“Hill Coolies”: Indian Indentured Labour and the Colonial Imagination, 1836-38’, South Asian Studies, 33(1), 2017, pp 23–36, pp 27–30.

13 On union opposition to ‘cheap coloured’ labour see Martínez, ‘Questioning “White Australia”’, p 1.

14 ‘Problems of Fiji’, Otago Witness, 3056, 9 October 1912, p 4.

15 Esme Cleall, ‘Orientalising Deafness: Race and Disability in Imperial Britain’, Social Identities, 21(1), 2015, pp 22–36, p 33.

16 Piya Chatterjee, ‘“Secure this Excellent Class of Labour”: Gender and Race in Labor Recruitment for British Indian Tea Plantations’, Bulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars, 27(3), pp 43-56, pp 43–44.

17 Stefanie Kennedy and Melanie J Newton, ‘The Hauntings of Slavery: Colonialism and the Disabled Body in the Caribbean’, in Shaun Grech and Karen Soldatic (eds), Disability in the Global South: The Critical Handbook, Cham: Springer, 2016, pp 379–391, pp 380–381.

18 Cleall, ‘Orientalising Deafness’, p 33.

19 Anne Borsay, Disability and Social Policy in Britain Since 1750, A History of Exclusion, Houndsmill: Palgrave, 2005, pp 12–13; David M Turner and Daniel Blackie, Disability in the Industrial Revolution: Physical Impairment in British Coalmining, 1780-1880, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2018, pp 4–8.

20 Mark Harvey, ‘Slavery, Indenture and the Development of British Industrial Capitalism’, History Workshop Journal, 88, 2019, pp 66–88, p 84.

21 Turner and Blackie, Disability in the Industrial Revolution, pp 5-8.

22 Piya Chatterjee, A Time for Tea: Women, Labor, and Post/colonial Politics on an Indian Plantation, London: Duke University Press, 2001, p 176.

23 Cleall, ‘Orientalising Deafness’, pp. 24–27, 32.

24 Kennedy and Newton, ‘The Hauntings of Slavery’, p 381.

25 Catherine Kudlick, ‘Disability History: Why we Need another “Other”’, The American Historical Review, 108(3) 2003, pp 763–793.

26 Neha Hui and Uma Kambhampati, ‘The Political Economy of Indian Indentured labour’, University of Reading Economics Discussion Papers, Reading, 2017, pp 1-26, p 9; Purba Hossain, ‘“A Matter of Doubt and Uncertainty”: John Gladstone and the Post-Slavery Framework of Labour in the British Empire’, Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 50(1) 2022, pp 52–80, p 62.

27 Major, ‘“Hill Coolies”: Indian Indentured Labour’, pp 23–36.

28 Hossain, ‘“A Matter of Doubt”’, pp 52–53.

29 Letter from Gillanders, Arbuthnot and Co. to Gladstone, June 6, 1836. Enclosure No.1 to Gladstone’s letters to Lord Glenelg, February 28, 1838, in Copies of All Orders in Council, or Colonial Ordinances, for the better regulations and enforcement of the relative duties of masters and employers, and articled servants, tradesmen and labourers, in the colonies of British Guiana and Mauritius and of correspondence relating thereof, 2 March 1838, [Hereafter, masters and employers] cited in Hossain, ‘“A Matter of Doubt”’, pp 53–55, p 61.

30 Letter from Gladstone to Hobhouse, February 23, 1837, in Enclosure 1 in No. 5, in masters and employers, cited in Hossain, ‘“A Matter of Doubt”’, pp 62–63.

31 Kaushik Ghosh, ‘A Market for Aboriginality: Primitivism and Race Classification in the Indentured Labour Market of Colonial India’, in Gautam Bhadra, Gyan Prakash and Susie Tharu (eds), Subaltern Studies X: Writings on South Asian History and Society, Delhi: Oxford University Press, pp 8–48, pp 18–19.

32 Ghosh, ‘A Market for Aboriginality’, pp 17–19, 23.

33 Major, ‘“Hill Coolies”: Indian Indentured Labour and the Colonial Imagination’, pp 23–36.

34 Deposition of John Mackay, in the Report of the Committee on Transportation, British Parliamentary Papers, 1837, XXII, p 191, cited in Ghosh, ‘A Market for Aboriginality’, p 17.

35 Ghosh, ‘A Market for Aboriginality’, p 17.

36 Letter from Gillanders, Arbuthnot and Co. to Gladstone, June 6, 1836, cited in Hossain, ‘“A Matter of Doubt”’, p 61.

37 Ghosh, ‘A Market for Aboriginality’, pp 12–13.

38 Ryan Hanley, ‘Slavery and the Birth of Working-Class Racism in England, 1814–1833’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 26, 2016, pp 103-123; Letter from Gillanders, Arbuthnot and Co. to Gladstone, June 6, 1836, cited in Hossain, ‘“A Matter of Doubt”’, p 62.

39 Ghosh, ‘A Market for Aboriginality’, p 9.

40 Deposition of J R Mayo, in the Report of the Committee on Transportation, British Parliamentary Papers, 1837, XXII, p 175, cited in Ghosh, ‘A Market for Aboriginality’, p 19.

41 Ghosh, ‘A Market for Aboriginality’, p 19.

42 Crispin Bates, ‘Some Thoughts on the Representation and Misrepresentation of the Colonial South Asian Labour Diaspora’, South Asian Studies, 33(1), 2017, pp 7–22, pp 8–9.

43 Ghosh, ‘A Market for Aboriginality’, pp 20–21; Sen Sunanda Sen, ‘Indentured Labour from India in the Age of Empire’, Social Scientist 44(1/2), 2016, pp 35–74, pp 45–47.

44 The Economist, Saturday, March 2, 1861, 019(914), p 227; The Economist, Saturday, July 16, 1859, 017(827), p 785 cited in Hui and Kambhampati, ‘The Political Economy of Indian Indentured labour’, p 11.

45 Sen, ‘Indentured Labour from India’, pp 53–54; Andrea Wright, ‘From Slaves to Contract Workers: Genealogies of Consent and Security in Indian Labor Migration’, Journal of World History, 32(1) 2021, pp 29–43, p 34.

46 Thomas R Metcalf, ‘“Hard hands and Sound Healthy Bodies”: Recruiting ‘Coolies’ for Natal, 1860–1911’, The Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, 30(3), 2002, pp 1–26, pp 4–10.

47 Brij V Lal, ‘Indenture: Experiment and Experience’, in Joya Chatterji and David Washbrook (eds), Routledge Handbook of the South Asia Diaspora, Abingdon: Routledge, 2018, pp 79–95p 83; Brij V Lal, Chalo Jahaji:on a Journey through Indenture in Fiji, ANU E Press, 2012, pp 106–7.

48 Chatterjee, ‘“Secure this Excellent Class of Labour”’, pp 43–44; S S Sumesh and Nitish Gogoi, ‘A Journey Beyond Colonial History: Coolies in the making of an “Adivasi Identity” in Assam’, Labor History, 62(2), 2021, pp 134–147, pp 135–7; Lal, ‘Indenture: Experiment and Experience’, p 79.

49 Metcalf, ‘“Hard hands and Sound Healthy Bodies”’, p 24 note 6.

50 Mitchell to Subagents, 3 Nov 1896, and to B.K. Gupta, 6 Nov 1896, Indian Immigration [II] Letter Books, II B/1/22, Kwa-Zulu Natal Archives, Pietermaritz, cited in Metcalf, ‘“Hard Hands and Sound Healthy Bodies”’, p 10.

51 Philippa Levine, ‘“A Multitude of Unchaste Women:” Prostitution in the British Empire’, Journal of Women's History, 15(4), 2004, pp 159–163, pp 161–2.

52 Cristina Visperas, ‘The Able-Bodied Slave’, Journal of Literary & Cultural Disability Studies, 13(1), 2019, pp 93–110, pp 93–94.

53 I M Cumpston, ‘Sir Arthur Gordon and the Introduction of Indians into the Pacific: The West Indian System in Fiji’, Pacific Historical Review, 25(4), 1956, pp 369–88, p 382.

54 Madhwi, ‘Recruiting Indentured Labour for Overseas Colonies, circa 1834–1910’, Social Scientist, 43(9/10), 2015, pp. 53–68, pp. 56-58; Madhwi, ‘“Able”, “Dis-abled” and “Invalid” Labourers: Disability and Indenture in Mauritius and Natal, c. 1840–1910’, in Esme Cleall (ed), Global Histories of Disability, 1700-2015: Power, Place and People, New York: Routledge, 2022, pp 44–55, pp 41–42; Metcalf, ‘“Hard Hands and Sound Healthy Bodies”’, pp 10–11.

55 Isabella Ville, ‘From Inaptitude for Work to Trial of the Self: The Vicissitudes of Meanings of Disability’, ALTER European Journal of Disability Research 4, 2010, pp 59-71, pp 60–62.

56 Jane Buckingham, ‘Disability, Leprosy, and Plantation Health among Indian Indentured Labourers in Fiji, 1879–1911’, in Henk Menke, Jane Buckingham, Farzana Gounder, Ashutosh Kumar and Maurits S Hassankhan (eds), Social Aspects of Health, Medicine and Disease in the Colonial and Post-Colonial Era, Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge, 2021, pp 199–221.

57 Madhwi, ‘“Able”, “Dis-abled” and “Invalid” Labourers’, p 49.

58 Margaret Mishra, ‘Undoing the “Madwoman”: A Minor History of Uselessness, Dementia and Indenture in Colonial Fiji’, Journal of International Women’s Studies, 19(6), 2018, pp 178–195, p 186.

59 Regulation 50 Indian Immigration Ordinance, Fiji, no. 1 of 1891, section 112, Report of the Committee on Emigration from India to the Crown Colonies and Protectorates, June 1910, 3, 5192 of Cd. (Great Britain. Parliament), [Hereafter Sanderson Commission] p 65.

60 Buckingham, ‘Disability, Leprosy, and Plantation Health’, pp 199–221.

61 Regulation 51 Indian Immigration Ordinance, Fiji, no. 1 of 1891, section 112, Sanderson Commission, p 65.

62 Burton, The Fiji of Today, p 268.

63 Anthony Cole, ‘Accidental Deaths on Fiji Plantations, 1879-1916’, in Brij V Lal, Chalo Jahaji: On a Journey through Indenture in Fiji, pp 324–336, p 326, Table 1 ‘Number of Deaths of Indentured Immigrants and Their Children by Type of Accident, 1879–1916’.

64 Cole, ‘Accidental Deaths’, pp 330–333.

65 ‘Report by J McNeill and Chimman Lal 1915 to the Government of India on the Conditions of Indian Indentured Labour in Four British Colonies (including Fiji), and Dutch Guiana’, [London, 1915] Fiji Section, Noel Butlin Archives Centre, Australian National University, N305, Box file F40, Folder 1, Document 8, [Hereafter McNeill-Lal Report, Fiji].

66 Cumpston, ‘Sir Arthur Gordon and the Introduction of Indians into the Pacific’, p 384, note 63.

67 Eugene J D’Souza, ‘Indian Indentured Labour in Fiji’, Proceedings of the Indian History Congress, 61(2), 2000–2001, pp 1071–1080, p 1075; Fiona Paisley, ‘Sexuality, Nationalism, and “Race”: Humanitarian Debate about Indian Indenture in Fiji, 1910–18’, Labour History, 113, 2017, pp 183–207.

68 Umesh Sharma and Helen Irvine, ‘The social consequences of control: Accounting for Indentured Labour in Fiji 1879-1920’, Qualitative Research in Accounting and Management, 13(2), 2016, pp 130-158, pp 130–132.

69 McNeill-Lal Report, Fiji, p 66.

70 McNeill-Lal Report, Fiji, p 248.

71 Holland, Indentured Labour, p 7

72 McNeill-Lal Report, Fiji, pp 248–249.

73 Arnab Dey, ‘Diseased Plantations: Law and the Political Economy of Health in Assam, 1860-1920’, Modern Asian Studies 52 (2), 2018, pp 645–682, p 469; Nandini Bhattacharya, Contagion and Enclaves: Tropical Medicine in Colonial India, Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2012, pp 10, 120–124.

74 McNeill-Lal Report, Fiji, pp 248-249.

75 Indian Immigration Ordinance, Fiji, no. 1 of 1891, section 3, 107 and 112, Sanderson Commission, p 64; McNeill-Lal Report, Fiji, p 252.

76 Indian Immigration Ordinance, Fiji, no. 1 of 1891, section 117, Sanderson Commission, 1910, p 65.

77 McNeill-Lal Report, Fiji, p 252.

78 Cumpston, ‘Sir Arthur Gordon and the Introduction of Indians into the Pacific’, pp 377–378.

79 Burton, The Fiji of Today, p 270.

80 Ralph Shlomowitz, ‘Indian and Pacific Islander Migrants in Fiji: A Comparative Analysis’, Journal of Pacific Studies 1, 1986, pp 59–86, p 66; Robert Nicole, Disturbing History: Resistance in Early Colonial Fiji, Honolulu, University of Hawai’i Press, pp 199–200.

81 Esme Cleall, Missionary Discourses of Difference: Negotiating Otherness in the British Empire, c.1840-1900, Houndmills, Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2012, p 119.

82 McNeill-Lal Report, Fiji, p 259; Vijay Naidu, The Violence of Indenture, Lautoka, 2004, 47–82.

83 Fiji Royal Gazette, 1908 A/R 1908 cited in Naidu, Violence of Indenture, p 66; Lal, ‘Murmurs of Dissent: Non-Resistance on Fiji Plantations’, The Hawaiian Journal of History, 20, 1986, pp 188-214, p 202.

84 Naidu, Violence of Indenture, pp 66–70.

85 Lal, ‘Murmurs of Dissent’, p 203.

86 Moynagh, Brown or White? pp 50, 52.

87 Holland, Indentured Labour, pp 7–8.

88 Burton, The Fiji of Today, pp 285–287.

89 Burton, The Fiji of Today, pp 292–293.

90 Burton, The Fiji of Today, p 290.

91 Burton, The Fiji of Today, p 291.

92 ‘Problems of Fiji’, Otago Witness, 3056, 9 October 1912, p 1009.

93 Naidu, The Violence of Indenture, pp 70-80; Brij V Lal, ‘The Odyssey of Indenture: Fragmentation and Reconstitution in the Indian Diaspora’, Diaspora: A Journal of Transnational Studies 5(2), 1996, pp 167–188, p 172.

94 Esme Cleall, Missionary Discourses, pp 119–122.

95 Margaret Mishra, ‘“Your woman is a Very Bad Woman”: Revisiting Female Deviance in Colonial Fiji’, Journal of International Women's Studies 17(4), 2016, pp 67-78; John D. Kelly, ‘“Coolie” as a Labour Commodity: Race, Sex, and European Dignity in Colonial Fiji’, The Journal of Peasant Studies 19(3-4), 1992, pp 246–267; Brij V Lal, ‘Veil of dishonour: Sexual jealousy and suicide on Fiji plantations’, The Journal of Pacific History 20(3), 1985, pp 135-155; Brij V Lal, ‘Kunti’s cry: Indentured women on Fiji plantations’, The Indian Economic & Social History Review, 22(1), 1985, pp 55–71, pp 58–59, 98.

96 D’Souza, ‘Indian Indentured Labour in Fiji’, p 1075; C F Andrews and W W Pearson, Report on indentured labour in Fiji: an independent enquiry, Calcutta, 1916.

97 ‘Report of Mr. Andrews' speech to the Planters' Association Executive Committee’, Fiji, Dec. 7th, 1915, National Library of Australia, p 4.

98 Brij V Lal, ‘Kunti’s cry: Indentured women on Fiji plantations’, The Indian Economic & Social History Review, 22(1), 1985, 55–71; Rajsekhar Basu, ‘Kunti’s Cry: Responses in India to the Cause of Emigrant Women, Fiji 1913–16’, Studies in People's History 7(2), 2020, pp 180–191; Karen A. Ray, ‘Kunti, Lakshmibhai and the “Ladies”: Women's Labour and the Abolition of Indentured Emigration from India’, Labour Capital and Society, 29(1&2), 1996, pp 126–152, pp 139–152.

99 Sen, ‘Indentured Labour from India’, p 54.

100 Kennedy and Newton, ‘The Hauntings of Slavery’, p 381.

101 Nicole, Disturbing History, pp 199–213.